Abu Aardvark

Al-Hurra under fire, again

Two major investigations into al-Hurra dropped yesterday, the first by CBS News/Pro Publica (airing on 60 Minutes) and the other by Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post (with part 2 slated for tomorrow).   Both delved nicely into the deep, structural problems with the station, making a number of points which I've raised over the last few years.  Both got some important and insightful people to speak on the record, and Pro Publica has posted some relevant documents on its website.   Since the Pro Publica site includes several links to Abu Aardvark, I suppose I should note that I did not get the chance to talk to them before they went to air.  Both pieces are far better than the witch-hunt led by the Wall Street Journal against Larry Register last year, though I thought Pro Publica fell into the trap of sensationalism by hyping some alleged anti-Israeli remarks that ran on al-Hurra recently - which might attract ratings while distracting from the bigger issues which they effectively raised.   I'm not going to get into the substantive issues they raise about the station's management (or lack thereof), content, or conception since I've said my piece on these issues many times and haven't got anything new to add.  Instead, I'll just recommend both for those interested in public diplomacy.   

I'm glad to see these issues get aired, and I hope that this will spark a serious debate over how to approach public diplomacy instead of another round of partisan warfare.   At the end of the day, the Post and Pro Publica focus attention on some big questions which remain unresolved:  Is the real problem conceptual or implementation and management?  Could something like al-Hurra have succeeded if done differently, or was it a missed opportunity?  What should al-Hurra be, a pseudo-independent news outlet or a mouthpiece for US foreign policy?  And should the station now be refurbished or should it be abandoned - particularly given half a billion dollars of sunk costs and the entry into the Arab TV arena of the British, Germans, Russians, and so many others?   It's important to have a serious debate about these kinds of questions, though this may have to wait for a new administration - either of which will no doubt take a new direction in the public diplomacy arena.   Maybe this even calls for a conference, or something....

Al-Hurra transparency begins with...

Yesterday I got a press release from al-Hurra announcing the guest of the upcoming episode of Robert Satloff's "Inside Washington", complete with a transcript of the program.   That's good - as long as I've been writing about the absence of transparency at the station, as best as I can recall this is the first transcript of any kind I've ever been offered by al-Hurra.  On the other hand, the featured guest was... John Bolton.  Bolton, of course, is particularly disliked in the Arab world, and his complaints about anti-American bias at the UN will repel more Arab viewers than it could hope to impress.  But the Wall Street Journal loves him...  and of course that's the only audience which really matters for al-Hurra anymore.   

I did notice, thanks to Kim Elliott, that a House Report has recommended an appropriation of $2.2 million to fund streaming video for al-Hurra and a 60 day archive of all their programs, as well as another $2 million for the random translation of 20 hours a week of its content to be posted on the al-Hurra website.   This sort of initiative was exactly the one good thing which I could see coming out of the al-Hurra trainwreck, and I hope it goes forward.  That's the only way to allow analysts on all sides of the spectrum to have access to the information they need to form judgements about the station's content - which might not be exactly what Ken Tomlinson and friends really wanted, at the end of the day.

AMS on al-Hurra

I've got a longer and slightly differently focused essay about the al-Hurra controversies now up in the opinion section of the online journal Arab Media and Society (formerly Transnational Broadcasting Studies). I actually wrote this one before the Guardian piece - some of the arguments are the same, but in this one I take a longer view and focus on some of my longer-standing points about the station.  Here are some excerpts of this one:

Some of the problems with Alhurra had to do with its management, others with more structural problems. Alhurra's founders seemed to think that the Arab world was like the former Soviet space, deprived of information and desperate for an objective, credible source of news and free public debate. That would have been true in the 1980s. But at the time of its launch (2004) the Arab world was actually drowning in satellite television, with multiple sources of information and talk shows which already discussed all the issues which Alhurra claimed to be introducing. Alhurra, with its stigma of American funding, never had a chance to be more than a drop in the ocean. Other than a few times when it irritated Syria, Alhurra simply failed to generate any political debate or controversy. 
...

The other major issue raised by these events has to do with Alhurra’s lack of transparency and accountability. Information about Alhurra’s content has always been hard to come by. Alhurra has no live feed available in the United States (unlike Radio Sawa, to which you can listen on-line), features only a rudimentary website, offers no transcripts of its programs in Arabic or English (unlike Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, both of which offer full transcripts of all their programs online), and does not even publish basic information about the topics of programs or their guests. There has simply been no way for anyone—whether Congress or external analysts within the United States—to monitor Alhurra’s content. Supposedly, Alhurra cannot provide such information because it would violate the Smith-Mundt Act against the domestic dissemination of foreign propaganda. But it’s telling that Radio Sawa—which falls under the same BBG mandate—offers a live streaming feed over the internet with no evident problems. This lack of transparency might better be seen as a method for avoiding accountability and for protecting the station’s reputation in Washington (and budgets). Perhaps now there will be more support for congressionally mandating transparency about the station’s programming.

Alhurra's new management might even welcome such transparency as its best protection against cherry-picking attacks such as Mowbray’s, in which unnamed insiders fed a steady stream of seemingly damning anecdotes which nobody else could either contextualize or critique. Such increased access to content might also increase its impact with the millions of Arabs who routinely read Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya’s websites—if, that is, anyone involved in the Alhurra debates actually cares about such things. 

Read the whole thing at Arab Media and Society.  While you're there, you can also read Ken Tomlinson's defense of al-Hurra, and (if you're getting bored of al-Hurra) Paul Cochrane's fascinating piece on the Lebanese media's role in fanning sectarianism.   

CIF: Al-Hurra Marti!

My article about the al-Hurra controversy should be up later this afternoon at the Guardian's Comment is Free site.  I suggest that with Larry Register's ouster and the appointment of Danny Nassif as his replacement, al-Hurra's transformation into an Arabic-language TV Marti is nearly complete.  You know TV Marti - the anti-Castro station beloved of conservatives and Cuban exiles which maintains extravagant budgets year after year even though nobody in Cuba ever sees it.  A fine use of American tax dollars, no doubt, and a fine symbol of the Bush administration's real commitments in the so-called war of ideas.   I'll provide a direct link if and when I get internet access this afternoon.  And as a side note, I'll get back to regular blogging here if and when the accursed Comcast gets the internet working in my new house.  I can hear DC locals giggling even as I type this...

UPDATE:  here's the link to the article.   Here are some excerpts:

On June 8, Larry Register announced his resignation from the troubled American Arabic-language satellite television station al-Hurra in the wake of a relentless campaign for his scalp by conservative journalists, members of congress, and disgruntled stalwarts of al-Hurra's previous, failed incarnation. The campaign recalls a similar sliming campaign against Alberto Fernandez, the state department's best Arabic-speaking public diplomat, crucified in the conservative media for an out of context snippet taken from one of his hundreds of live media appearances. Register's resignation likely seals the fate of al-Hurra, which looks ever more like Radio and TV Marti - the anti-Castro stations beloved of American conservatives and Cuban exiles which maintains exorbitant budgets year after year even though hardly any Cubans ever tune in.

....Overall, al-Hurra came across as a third-rate Lebanese TV station rather than America's flagship public diplomacy enterprise. By 2006 it had become clear that al-Hurra had failed to win any significant audience or generate any meaningful political debate. Before conservatives suddenly decided to go after Register, it was rather hard to find even a single person not on al-Hurra's payroll with a good word to say about it....

After a scathing Government Accountability Office report criticised the station's management and performance, Harb left under a cloud of criticism. His departure, along with the replacement of the uber-partisan Ken Tomlinson as chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, offered al-Hurra a fresh start. Larry Register, an old CNN hand, was brought in to try and salvage the sinking station.

.....

His attempt to transform al-Hurra into something worthwhile triggered an endless deluge of savage articles in the Wall Street Journal by the non-Arabic-speaking journalist Joel Mowbray, presumably fueled by leaks from still fuming members of al-Hurra's old regime (Tomlinson bragged on Fox News that he "stood virtually alone in trying to expose this inside government"). And so, in an impressively short time, Register's support in congress and the BBG crumbled, and he quit.

.....

Register's fate demonstrates that trying to produce a professional news product for the American government means career suicide, and few are likely to try again any time soon. Just like public diplomats after the Fernandez incident, al-Hurra staff will always look over their shoulders in fear of a conservative crusade, and will be unlikely to take risks or even try to put forward interesting news or political arguments. Clearly desperate to get an Arabic speaker - any Arabic speaker - into Register's job (his lack of Arabic proved his Achilles heel), the BBG chose the Lebanese director of Radio Sawa's news, Danny Nassif, to take over, at least temporarily. With this return to the old regime, al-Hurra's transformation into an Arab TV Marti seems complete.

Read the whole thing over at the Guardian's Comment is Free.

 

While I've been gone: al-Hurra

Since I've last posted, Larry Register has resigned from al-Hurra in the face of relentless conservative criticism.  I've got a short article coming out sometime around the end of the week on the controversy, if all goes well (I promise, George!), so I'll just leave it at that for now. 

On the Media: al-Hurra

I'm in the last stages of packing - my office is gone and my house is overrun with movers - but I took half an hour this afternoon to talk to NPR's On the Media program about the recent al-Hurra controversies.  I believe it is slated to air this week whenever On the Media usually airs where you live, so tune in if you're into that sort of thing.
UPDATE:  transcript here, eventually.

Al-Hurra controversy: one good thing

I find myself really bemused by the latest round of controversy over al-Hurra.  I've long been a public critic of the American Arabic-language television station, and have no particular interest in defending it. On the other hand, the current wave of attacks is deceptive, dishonest, and transparently partisan on behalf of the disgruntled old regime.   For the most part, I'm happy to sit it out since I've got no dog in the fight.  But there is one good thing which could come out of it:  perhaps al-Hurra will finally realize that it needs to be more transparent and make transcripts and feeds of its programming publicly available. 

The current round of criticism, launched by Joel Mowbray in a series of Wall Street Journal op-eds, really dates back to the shift in the station's leadership. Last year, the founding director Mowafic Harb left under a cloud of criticism (a particularly damning GAO report seems to have finished him off).  Neither of the key backers of Harb's al-Hurra, Norman Pattiz and the uber-partisan Ken Tomlinson, have been renominated to the Broadcasting Board of Governors.  Larry Register, an old CNN hand, was brought in to replace Harb and salvage the al-Hurra project. 

At the time Harb departed, al-Hurra was widely recognized as a failure, having achieved little market share and even less political impact - other than a few times when it irritated Syria, al-Hurra simply failed to generate any political debate or controversy. By all accounts the station was poorly run and demoralized; I was frequently regaled with stories of odd personnel and budget decisions.  The station's management seemed far more interested in promoting itself in Congress than in the Middle East, exemplified by its endlessly chipper, exaggerated claims about a vast market share rarely replicated in independent market surveys.   By last year, most observers had come around to my argument that al-Hurra was a white elephant, an expensive irrelevance.  Very few American officials even bothered to appear on it, preferring to spend their valuable time on Arabic TV stations with an actual audience. 

The problems went deeper than that, though.  Al-Hurra's founders seemed to think that the Arab world was like the former Soviet space, deprived of information and desperate for an objective, credible source of news and free public debate.  That would have been true in the 1980s.  But at the time of its launch (2004) the Arab world was actually drowning in satellite television, with multiple sources of information and talk shows which already discussed all the issues which al-Hurra claimed to be introducing.  Al-Hurra, with its stigma of American funding, never had a chance to be more than a drop in the ocean.   But at least it could try - by exploiting its comparative advantage in covering American politics for instance, or by using its American backing as protection when covering senstive topics in Arab countries.   When Larry Register took over, he began doing exactly that: trying to actually win an audience by covering issues which Arabs actually cared about, featuring a wider, more diverse range of voices, and trying (against the odds) to establish al-Hurra as a model of free media rather than American propaganda. 

That's the context of Joel Mowbray's crusade against al-Hurra.  Giving voice to the bitter old regime, he spins a fantasy narrative in  which al-Hurra once upon a time had been successful at promoting democracy but had since abandoned critical reporting and coverage of democracy and humans rights issues.  While I can't speak to the wider picture (for reasons to which I'll return in a moment), I will point out that the only al-Hurra program which I have ever seen generate any Arab public discussion was a program on torture in Egypt -  which ran during Register's tenure and not Harb's.   Most of his campaign relies either on channeling dirt from disgruntled employees or on cherry picking examples of bad behavior - the usual tricks of the hatchet job trade.   Honestly, I'm quite impressed at the effectiveness of the conservative noise machine on this one - Mowbray's Wall Street Journal column has been pushed by conservative blogs, been picked up by other newspapers and advocacy groups, and Republican members of Congress have gotten into the action.  Register's job seems to be potentially in danger.  Back in 2004, I wrote in a contribution to a book edited by Bill Rugh that if al-Hurra did try to produce an effective product "it will likely find itself coming under Congressional and partisan criticism which could adversely affect its independence and budget."  Thanks to Mowbray for making my point.

So, that's where I stand on this al-Hurra controversy.  But Mowbray does make one very good point with which I agree wholeheartedly: 

Unfortunately, there is no practicable way that Foggy Bottom, or anyone else for that matter, can effectively monitor Al-Hurra... The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), the congressionally created independent panel charged with oversight, lacks the ability to conduct even basic auditing, as English transcripts are provided only on request--which rarely happens.

He's right.  The lack of transparency at al-Hurra makes it impossible to have any serious oversight or accountability, as I've been arguing in vain for three years now.  Al-Hurra has no live feed available in the United States (unlike Radio Sawa, to which you can listen on-line), features only a rudimentary website, and offers no transcripts of its programs in Arabic or English (unlike al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya, both of which offer full transcripts of all their programs online).  I used to be on al-Hurra's email list, which at least gave a list of guests and topics, but I don't seem to have received any for quite a while and at any rate that information is not available in any public site of which I'm aware.  This means that even if I wanted to defend al-Hurra's programming, I couldn't.   

So that's where I end up.  The one good thing which can come of this overblown al-Hurra controversy would be for al-Hurra's management to realize that transparency is its best protection against cherry-picking attacks.  I always suspected that al-Hurra under Harb's management resisted making transcripts or a feed available because it wanted absolute control over the station's image in Washington, and didn't want independent critics (like me) to be able to watch it.  Register seems to have corrected some of the programming and institutional mistakes of his predecessor.  Now he should correct this one, in his own self-interest.   Al-Hurra needs to make its programming transparent, with a live feed and full transcripts (in Arabic, at least) available online.  This would not only reduce the risks of cherry-picked outrage, but would - more importantly -  increase its impact in the Arab world and respond constructively to demands for accountability.

Wow, is al-Hurra doing something right?

Like most people who pay attention to the Arab media, I've long since stopped paying much attention to the American Arabic satellite TV station al-Hurra, other than the morbid "16 car pileup on the highway" fascination over the occasional story I hear.   From its launch in 2004 until last year, when its director Muwafic Harb resigned/was removed and the original incarnation of the station finally put out of its misery, al-Hurra simply made no impact on Arab politics.  Virtually nobody watched it, it never established an identity or a reason for being, and it pretty much disappeared into the ocean of Arab satellite TV without a ripple.  The worst part about it was that its existence misled Congress and many Americans into mistakenly thinking that the US was "doing something" on public diplomacy.  Piles of money were shoveled onto it with little to show, while other programs were starved and the urgency surrounding revamped public diplomacy after 9/11 was dissipated.   

One notable characteristic of this era of al-Hurra was that there was frustratingly little accountability or oversight.  As a blistering GAO report last year demonstrated, there was very little evidence that al-Hurra was meeting performance benchmarks as would be expected of other governmental agencies.     The al-Hurra administration often seemed more concerned with defending its budgets than with engaging in the real Middle East - hence the endless stream of peppy press releases proclaiming dramatic increases in audiences and market share (progress which no other market surveys ever seemed to capture).   Finally, scrutiny of the station's content was virtually impossible for anyone in the United States:  no feed was available for Arabic speakers in the United States to monitor, no transcripts of programs were made available on the station's rudimentary website, and nobody in Congress had the language skills or access to information to even begin to evaluate what it was doing.  I was told that al-Hurra could not provide such access because it would violate the Smith-Mundt Act against the domestic dissemination of foreign propaganda - but that's obviously untrue, since Radio Sawa - which falls under the same BBG mandate - offers a live feed online with no evident problems.   

Anyway, Harb is gone now, as are his (and al-Hurra's) main bureaucratic backers - Norm Pattiz and Ken Tomlinson - and the CNN veteran Larry Register was brought in to try to salvage what could be salvaged.... so the old regime is now complaining, as old regimes do.

That's the context of Joel Mowbray's attack on al-Hurra's new management in the Wall Street Journal.  Mowbray is incensed about the new al-Hurra:

Within weeks of becoming news director, Mr. Register put his own stamp on the network. Producers and on-air talent quickly understood that change was underway. Investigations into Arab government wrongdoing or oppression were no longer in vogue, and the ban on turning the airwaves over to terrorists was lifted. For those who had chafed under Mr. Register's predecessor -- who curbed the desire of many on staff to make Al-Hurra more like al-Jazeera -- the new era was welcomed warmly. "Everybody feels emboldened. Register changed the atmosphere around here," notes one staffer. "Register is trying to pander to Arab sympathies," says another.

Mowbray's critique actually makes it look like Register is doing a decent job.   By Mowbray's own account, Register revived a demoralized newsroom and actually began trying to compete for market share.  Imagine that, trying to address issues that Arabs care about on an Arabic TV station!  Register is also apparently allowing a politically more diverse array of guests to speak live and uncensored.  To Mowbray, "he should know that live TV is the wrong venue for firebrands or guests prone to outrageous commentary."  To most observers of Arab media, live TV is both very attractive to Arab viewers (one of al-Jazeera's calling cards) and a far more liberal approach (live talk shows suggest a "public sphere", while edited programs allow for state control and censorship).  If it's true that Register is pushing for live interactions rather than scripted, controlled settings then he's doing something else right.  Mowbray grudgingly admits that "it is true that al-Hurra has increased its coverage of U.S. politics."  That's great - since, as a certain critic of al-Hurra advised its new management on arrival,  "there remains one niche which has not really been filled in which al-Hurra could actually have a competitive advantage:  coverage of America and of American politics." 

His main charge is that al-Hurra had been instructed to stop pushing investigations of "Arab government wrongdoing".  Now, even if true, this would greatly exaggerate what it did under Harb, which rarely bothered any Arab government except occasionally Syria.  I did see some al-Hurra coverage of the Egyptian anti-torture/police brutality campaign, which Wa'il Abass greatly appreciated... but that happened under Register, not Harb.  Alas, even if Mowbray's allegations were true, it would accurately reflect the change in American foreign policy over the last year, which has abandoned democracy promotion in the region in favor of building an anti-Iranian coalition - so Mowbray might take it up with the Bush administration. 

I'm in no position to judge whether Mowbray's charges about al-Hurra's content are accurate, though, since as I've been complaining for years the station still offers no live feed available in the United States or transcripts of its programs - an ongoing problem which will continue to plage oversight.  In an update posted on a conservative blog, Mowbray says that the BBG responded with a letter that accused him of ""accept[ing] -- lock, stock, and barrel -- imprecise information" that resulted in creating a "generalized web of inaccuracies.""  The real problem, as I've been saying for years, is that the lack of access to the station's programming shields it from scrutiny and makes it difficult for anyone to either criticize or defend it with any credibility.  After citing one example of al-Hurra's malfeasance, Mowbray says "Translations were provided by a fluent Arabic-speaking U.S. government official."  That's nice.  Did this helpful official also provide translations of the rest of the content to judge the context of the remarks and their representativeness, or was s/he just - god forbid - cherry-picking in order to score political points?  How would we know?   Wouldn't it be nice if the transcripts (like audience market survey data) were available to the public to see in context and judge for themselves?  He also says that "Faced with my Wall Street Journal column on U.S. taxpayer-financed al-Hurra is becoming a platform for Islamic terrorists, as well as an outlet for the jihadists' propaganda, the panel that oversees the network could have chosen to comb the archives to see if reform is needed."  Could they?  Are such archives available?  Not by my experience, but I'd be happy to learn of their existence and availability to scrutiny - and to note the irony of this suddenly becoming an important issue, after I've been writing about it for years.

Best part?  Mowbray writes:  "If al-Hurra doesn't talk about human rights abuses across the Arab world, who will? Unfortunately, no one with the same potential reach."  How about al-Jazeera (which not only reported on the American human rights report, and regularly reports and discusses issues of human rights and political freedoms, but also recently ran a long interview with the director of Amnesty International on "open issues in human rights") and al-Masry al-Yom... you know, the real Arab media that Arabs actually watch and read?  (I couldn't find anything on the human rights report in the allegedly liberal Saudi al-Arabiya, but that will surprise only those who think that al-Arabiya is really liberal, as opposed to just Saudi and currently pushing a pro-American line because that's the current Saudi agenda.)

Basically, if Ken Tomlinson and Muwafic Harb are upset with al-Hurra's new direction, then odds are Register is doing something right.  Tomlinson and Harb presided over a legendary failure, a white elephant which achieved few of its goals and became a laughing-stock on those rare occasions when it was even noticed.   I doubt that Register will be able to turn al-Hurra into a player in the Arab media market, simply because of how competitive that market is and because of the stigma attached to a US-government station.   But it sounds like he's on the right track, trying to do the best he can with the hand he's been dealt.  The squawking from Mowbray, Tomlinson, Pattiz and Harb should be taken as a good sign. 

Meanwhile on al-Hurra

MEANWHILE:  I've often heard that America's expensive Arabic language TV station al-Hurra would cover democratic elections and reform issues, which the rest of the existing Arab media was supposedly ignoring (the first part of that seems like a good enough use of the station if it's going to exist, even if the second part has just always been wrong).  Well, most of the Arab media including al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya has the Bahraini elections at or near the top of its news agenda.  What about al-Hurra?   I don't know how al-Hurra is covering the Bahraini elections on the air, since it still offers no feed available here in the US, so I only have this selection of "top stories" on its website to go by (if anybody is actually watching it today and sees some in-depth election coverage, drop me a line).  According to its website, these are al-Hurra's top five stories right now (1:45 Saturday afternoon - it probably will change throughout the day, I'd hope): 

• Khalid Mishal threatens a renewed intifada
• Harith al-Dhari calls for Arab states to withdraw recognition from the Iraqi government
• George Bush's Thanksgiving radio address thanked American troops for their sacrifices
• Veiled Egyptian students protest in Alexandria
• American troops kill 22 armed insurgents north of Baghdad

Too bad there was no room for Bahrain's elections in the top five stories of the day.  What, oh what, could have possibly been cut to make room for it?   Hey, maybe we could play "one of these things is not like the others, one of these things does not belong" and figure it out?

bleg: watch al-hurra

Bleg:  anyone living over in the Arab world who happens to be in the mood, could you switch over from your normal Arab TV station of choice and watch some of al-Hurra's coverage of the election?   And either in comments or over email, tell us how it looked:  interesting?  politically balanced?  significantly superior to the coverage of American politics offered by other Arab TV stations?    Not looking for preconceived notions, for or against:  just watch it and report what you saw.  Thanks!